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Some guy is restoring classic DKC music in HD using the original hardware

Petruccis Biceps

Petruccis Biceps

Member
Oct 27, 2017
4,527
I was browsing around on youtube last night and saw something in my recommended videos. It was this video of Aquatic Ambience using the actual synths:



From the description:
What you're hearing is the original samples used to create Aquatic Ambience from Donkey Kong Country, combined with the music instruction data from the game, plus mixing and mastering magic for a perfect recreation of what a studio recording would have sounded like.

How:
-I used rarespc to convert the audio data into MIDI
-Located the original samples (with the help of SPC Tool for reference) from various 90s Roland and Korg machines including the Wavestation, M1, U-220, and R-8 -matched up the correct samples with the MIDI data in FLStudio (again, using SPC Tool for reference), and voila, a perfect recreation
-Mixed & mastered it, and added reverb
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Here is a link to his dropbox, that has many other remastered tracks: Currently remastered tracks

There are a bunch of fan favorites such as Stickerbush Symphony, Forest Interlude, Fear Factory, etc. Fair warning, if you listen to Ice Cave Chant, try not to jack the volume up as some of the crystally sounds have really ear piercing levels.

I always love hearing stuff like this because I've always wondered what these tracks would sound like without the SNES compression. I think the composer of the Goldeneye soundtrack had uncompressed versions of that game on his website as well.

Enjoy!
 
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SweetVermouth

SweetVermouth

Banned
Mar 5, 2018
4,272
That's pretty cool and I can barely imagine how much of a pain in the ass it must be to find all the right samples. This might not even be possible if some tracks use samples from actual synthesizers and not just romplers.
 
ArmsofSleep

ArmsofSleep

Banned
Oct 27, 2017
7,833
Washington DC
Man, these really are incredible. Like way exceeded my expectations for what this would sound like. I would pay good money to hear this done with other soundtracks of that era.

Like, some of the songs feel so full now. Fear Factory is giving my CHILLS my goodness
 
SweetVermouth

SweetVermouth

Banned
Mar 5, 2018
4,272
What's really interesting about this is that for example some SNES games use samples from the Korg M1. When the M1 was originally released it had a price tag of over $2000. The impressive thing about that is, the SPC700 could sample it without any hassle and was part of a machine that retailed only for 200 bucks. The sampling technology meant the SPC700 could recreate sounds from literally any synthesizer (even new ones released today), as long as you could fit it into the RAM. In contrast the Mega Drive will always sound like an FM Synth.
 
miscellaneous houseplant

miscellaneous houseplant

self-requsted ban
Banned
Oct 25, 2017
306
This is such a neat little project.
SweetVermouth said:
What's really interesting about this is that for example some SNES games use samples from the Korg M1. When the M1 was originally released it had a price tag of over $2000. The impressive thing about that is, the SPC700 could sample it without any hassle and was part of a machine that retailed only for 200 bucks. The sampling technology meant the SPC700 could recreate sounds from literally any synthesizer (even new ones released today), as long as you could fit it into the RAM. In contrast the Mega Drive will always sound like an FM Synth.
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Even more impressive is that the Sega CD, with its CD-ROM drive, could play back uncompressed recordings of any instrument, regardless of how much it cost! Even whole songs, with multiple instruments! We could have gotten these studio-quality versions way back in '94 if only Rare had made DKC for the Sega CD.
 
Fanto

Fanto

Is this tag ok?
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Oct 25, 2017
11,863
This is so fucking cool, thanks for sharing OP!

Edit: God damn yeah, Forest Interlude sounds amazing, I love this haha.
 
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Anth0ny

Anth0ny

Member
Oct 25, 2017
46,761
taking in dat aquatic ambience like

tumblr_inline_p66dz2riejfe.gif
 
StayMe7o

StayMe7o

Member
May 11, 2018
1,016
Kamurocho
thanks for sharing!

edit: and he's sharing his project files too!

edit 2: Wow, he's remaking some of the sounds with Harmor. Awesome work
 
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NotLiquid

NotLiquid

One Winged Slayer
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Oct 25, 2017
34,735
that Forest Interlude restoration

holy fuck I can feel the divinity in my cochleas

ms3y40E.gif
 
Burai

Burai

Member
Oct 27, 2017
2,080
This is great.

And now I need someone at Nintendo to take the original SGI workstation renderings to make 4K sprites, mate them with the uncompressed audio and release Donkey Kong Country HD.
 
Ginger Hail

Ginger Hail

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Oct 25, 2017
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Going to have to listen to these after work. The example in the OP already gave me chills.
 
jett

jett

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Oct 25, 2017
44,647
That's an impressive amount of work done by this guy. Some of it sounds off to me (especially Ice Cave Chant) but it's still pretty nice.

SweetVermouth said:
What's really interesting about this is that for example some SNES games use samples from the Korg M1. When the M1 was originally released it had a price tag of over $2000. The impressive thing about that is, the SPC700 could sample it without any hassle and was part of a machine that retailed only for 200 bucks. The sampling technology meant the SPC700 could recreate sounds from literally any synthesizer (even new ones released today), as long as you could fit it into the RAM. In contrast the Mega Drive will always sound like an FM Synth.
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Kinda silly to bring 25 year-old console wars into this topic.

p.s. The Genesis has a PCM channel which allowed it to use samples. And what the Genesis sounded like varied greatly depending on the driver used and the composer/engineer behind it.
 
andymcc

andymcc

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Oct 25, 2017
26,245
Columbus, OH
jett said:
That's an impressive amount of work done by this guy. Some of it sounds off to me (especially Ice Cave Chant) but it's still pretty nice.


Kinda silly to bring 25 year-old console wars into this topic.

p.s. The Genesis has a PCM channel which allowed it to use samples. And what the Genesis sounded like varied greatly depending on the driver used and the composer/engineer behind it.
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let's start posting music from Gauntlet IV and Devil Crash MD to correct this thread.
 

Deleted member 11182

User requested account closure
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Oct 27, 2017
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Wow sounds excellent. I'm gonna link to these whenever someone asks for an orchestrated redo of a game's ost. Synths > Orchestra.
 
lazygecko

lazygecko

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Oct 25, 2017
3,628
SweetVermouth said:
What's really interesting about this is that for example some SNES games use samples from the Korg M1. When the M1 was originally released it had a price tag of over $2000. The impressive thing about that is, the SPC700 could sample it without any hassle and was part of a machine that retailed only for 200 bucks. The sampling technology meant the SPC700 could recreate sounds from literally any synthesizer (even new ones released today), as long as you could fit it into the RAM. In contrast the Mega Drive will always sound like an FM Synth.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Well, yeah. Most games at the time pulled samples from various popular rompler libraries at the time. Thing is, said romplers were usually in the range of 16-32mb of memory, compared to 64kb on the SNES. Fitting everything you want and also making it sound good enough within that memory budget is where the technical artistry lies. And those trimmed down, diet size samples is where the trademark "SNES sound" comes from. There are still certain types of sounds you flat out cannot do accurately with so little memory (I imagine most of that extra memory for the romplers went to using multi-sample instruments with different samples for different octave ranges, rather than making each individual sample as high quality as they could), and that's primarily long sounds that seamlessly evolve over time. That's not something you even saw much on said romplers, and the desired effects had to be created artificially since it couldn't be inherent in the samples, like using filter envelopes and built in effects like flangers/phasers. This is one area where the FM synths of the time did not have that particular problem and could add more natural texture to its sounds, although it wasn't leveraged much back in the day since the zeitgeist at the time didn't really put much stock in such qualities.
 
SolmisateSol

SolmisateSol

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Nov 2, 2017
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Forest Interlude sounds so crisp, so clean, so fresh! I'm losing my mind right now.

Thank you for sharing, this is Quality.Resetera.Content
 
Txai

Txai

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Oct 25, 2017
351
Pretty great, but the harmonica in Aquatic Ambiance and Forest Interlude sounds out of tune.
 
Pargon

Pargon

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Oct 27, 2017
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This is great. Some of the tracks sound a little bit strange compared to the CDs though.
It's a shame that they would go to the effort of remastering these, and then release low bit-rate MP3s for all but one of the tracks though.
 
DHR54

DHR54

Oh well.
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Oct 26, 2017
685
Canada
Good find. Thanks for sharing this and props to the original guy who did the work.

!!! Imagine if somebody did this with Final Fantasy VI. Oh my gosh. Actually there is an album of Dragon Quest IX music that they made with all the uncompressed samples it's really good too. Love DQ9 music.
 
Barrel Cannon

Barrel Cannon

The Fallen
Oct 25, 2017
9,286
I'm in love man. Thanks for the post!

I have used the raw rips of the SNES library of music on winamp for years but this is even better than that quality-wise. The best part of this all is that someone will inject this music into SD2SNES to play DKC with it
 
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